


Mĕdulla

by fraisemilk



Series: For peace comes dropping slow [1]
Category: Gintama
Genre: Angst, Be forever yorozuya spoilers, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 01:46:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3710257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraisemilk/pseuds/fraisemilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fear without life is: Death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mĕdulla

**Author's Note:**

> mĕdulla (medullă, medullæ): marrow.

It washes over you like a wave of salted water. It burns your eyes and invades your mouth and your lungs, crushes your body and entraps your limbs and engulfs you in darkness – death’s grip tight between your navel and your forehead; and you think: maybe it’s over for me.

But when you open your eyes, the wave is gone, the water and the struggle and the pain nothing but a mirage already fading in the past instant. Instead of dark, dark pain, you see a sky – _the_ sky -, and then a tree, and then tombstones.

 

* * *

 

The city is not the city. Something is _missing_. Otose and Kagura and Shinpachi, even the streets and the city’s sky grabbers. Something is _aching_. This is a ruthless pain you’ve always felt but never seen so vividly, incarnated in every voice, every angry stare, every shaking hand and every grumbling stomach: loss, a loss so intense the city has crumbled down to reveal its bones.

The city is not the city anymore, and its inhabitants –

 

* * *

 

Loss changes you; it burns away your fears and replaces it with a different kind of anguish. Troubles the deep sea of your dreams, fills you with the feeling of drowning – you wake up and wake up and wake up and realize only tiny pieces of your heart, of your left lung, and of your stomach are missing.

 

* * *

 

Odd: a place once brimming with life turned into a solemn rag, a gigantic mausoleum.

The terminal is gone to rack and ruin. The metallic panels show behind their rusted frames the veins of old electric wires; the floor is strewn with rotten leaves; you can hear at each step you take the whole structure resonate and shiver. The bleeding light gives to the place a disquieting air. Heavy broken pillars take the eerie aspect of gory remains – lungs wrecked, wind rushing in and out of the vast corpse, a pierced stomach exposing years-old leftovers of an interrupted dinner. A ship hit by a hurricane, turned into a wreck.

What kind of fire has touched the city’s heart? The hurriedness that kept you going the whole day has faded – the beating of your heart slows down, your breathing stops. You walk up the stairs towards the heavens, and it feels like you’re ascending to hell.

Odd: twisted rotting tower gnawed at by rats and gales – the silent beating, now. Then: so loud, this gap: a gap, within a gap, within a gap. No aging woman to welcome you here, nor dangos nor flowers: only the gaps, and the gusty guts of a life, which once was.

Odd: walking there in the pith, like plumber feather pulling on a lifeless thread.

Odd: you feel it – the call of fear. Twisting the very breath that stopped. Making your legs fill with immobile blood. Fear without life is: Death.

Odd: every contour, every flesh wound, the tower and your own body: everything is like a dream.

 

* * *

 

The only thing you find here is: You. Clothed in blood-stained rags and a scapular around your neck– blood-stained you, and pale, dead skin. Bone marrow written on your wrists, on your cheeks, reflected deep from within your eyes and your cursed blood. Odd: something missing and aching in this _you_. Sometimes too old and too stained to be washed off by river rain ocean blues. Unnatural, this smile wishing for white-haired Death’s embrace. Odd. Odd. There, in your very blood, is the mistake, the bad spell, the mad-eyed lurking illness. 

 

* * *

 

What kind of fire has burned the city’s bones? What kind of fire has charred its people’s bonds?

A white-haired fire – a drifting cloud that settled behind a grave and held the hand of the woman and ate the dead man’s dangos.

Death’s final message to Humankind was hidden in the blood cells of a walking fire.

 

* * *

 

You press the tip of your sword, there: tuck the blade between two of your ribs, push down. It sinks in. There. Over. Everything: over. For a second you can see it: a vision of life before the wrong came to the world. Before the fevers and the white-haired bodies. Oh, you can see it, almost seize it – you can watch the rats running away and the flesh recompose itself around the pillars; the stones fly back to the shaking structure and the stained floor fix itself under your feet. It is only the second of an instant – then you fall and you’re dead and you stare at yourself – yourself dead, dead and smiling and _dead_ , here, and you stare knowing it is not yet finished.  

 

* * *

 

Odd: _you_ are the missing piece, and _you_ have to disappear.

 

* * *

 

It washes over you like a wave of salted water; it burns your eyes and invades your mouth and your lungs, crushes your body and entraps your limbs and engulfs you in darkness – death’s grip tight between your navel and your forehead; and you think: that’s it.

And when you open your eyes, there are dark shadows running on the land in front of you. You see the sky and _this_ sky you know. Grey pieces of wood imbedded in the earth and rotten cracks of blood rooted on your wrists and on your knuckles; hit, kill, destroy. Your lungs stop somewhere along the way; you keep running, killing on the path you create.

 

* * *

 

The illness is hiding in the bone marrow. One more time, you softly press the tip of your sword in the motionless instant: there, tuck the bloody blade between bone and flesh. There: squeeze out the poison with your death. Cut the thread. Cut _your_ thread. From this instant, _Gintoki_ is no more. No more.

Odd: you feel like crying even though you saved the world.

 

* * *

 

The city is not the city. Something is _missing_. Something is _aching_ in Otose and Kagura and Shinpachi, in the streets and the city’s sky grabbers.

Odd: in the night they wake up, and wake up, and wake up. Fumble in the dark, almost seize a nil mirage. Fall back asleep, because it’s all a dream, only a dream.

Odd: a dark wave that never existed took away tiny, tiny pieces of their heart, of their left lung, of their stomach.

Odd: the illness is hiding in the bone marrow, but without its bone marrow, the city cannot stand.

**Author's Note:**

> Gintoki keeps killing himself in this movie. 
> 
>  (tumblr: da-da-daaa)


End file.
